Nic Dempsey

1oz midori
1oz cointreau
1oz lemon juice

Shake over ice, pour into glass, drink.

Happy Friday…

I was reading this today and the comments got me thinking.

This St Patrick’s Day, I will be watching the National Theatre’s production of Frankenstein at a cinema in Kensingston (the theatre was sold out). I may at some point drink some Guinness (’cause it’s tasty and why not?) and I love Dublin, drink whiskey and am a Dempsey and raised Catholic, but I’m not Irish.

My Dad (the first of his family to be born in England) used so say that he was English of Irish descent and it used to puzzle me. Everyone else I knew with Irish parents were keen on being Irish, they went to Ireland in the summer, called themselves Irish. My Dad didn’t. I never knew my Irish grandparents and my Mum was English, so feeling Irish and going to Ireland wasn’t the big thing that it seemed to be for the kids I knew who had Irish parents. I went to Ireland twice as a kid, at age 6 and 10, with my Dad’s sister, Jude and my cousins. Jude seemed to be the only one of my Dad’s siblings who went to Ireland and kept in touch with the Irish relatives, they went every year and I’m pretty sure that she took all of her nieces and nephews as well as her own kids to Ireland at some point.

I asked my Dad why he said he was English and only had a British passport (I know Jude had both British and Irish passports) and apart from pointing out that both his parents were technically British (born before Irish independence), he said that he wasn’t Irish because he was born in England and that England had provided work for his parents, housed his family, educated him, looked out for his health. England was where he’d paid his taxes, married, had children. That to grow up in England in the 50’s and 60’s was a great and liberating thing and to claim that he was Irish was pretty bloody insulting to his Irish family who had grown up in Ireland without the advantages and benefits that he had. So as far as he was concerned he was English of Irish descent. This didn’t prevent him behaving like his Irish father. Heavy drinking and feckless, my father was a bad husband and not a fantastic dad. You could blame this on belonging to a fucked up and damaged family or on his being Irish but I think the truth was somewhere in-between.

I have friends with a similar background to me and we often talk about Irish Catholic guilt as a genetic inheritance (I also have my mother’s Protestant work ethic, which pretty much means I’m screwed every which way) but I honestly don’t feel Irish.

Ireland didn’t raise me, England did.

So despite the Catholicism I can’t quite shake, the Irish surname and the guilt that is ever present, I’m not Irish. My two favourite Irishmen are Jonathan Swift and the Duke of Wellington (who both considered themselves to be English!).

I’m English, I would pass the Norman Tebbit cricket test and whilst St Patrick’s Day is a great excuse for drinking tasty, tasty Guinness, it’s not even close to being my national holiday. I will always be slightly confused by people who were raised in England, claiming to be Irish.

That’s all…

It’s been said that I have too many books. I maintain there is no such thing…

This year though what I do have is too many books that I haven’t read or haven’t finished. This needs to change. For 2011, I’m going to list them here and mark off when I’ve read them. Please bear in mind that I don’t own all of them!

1. The Compleat Rifleman Harris – Benjamin Harris read
2. Tales from the Rifle Brigade – Captain Sir John Kincaid
(both of these are the books that I bought Ma and are doing the rounds of the family, we’ve finally got Ben interested in the Peninsular Wars so now we’ll all obsessed! And I need to grab the Harry Smith memoirs whilst we’ll at it!)
3. Shades of Grey – Jasper Fforde read
4. One Day – David Nicholls read
5. A Week in December – Sebastian Faulks
6. A Gambling Man – Jenny Uglow
7. The American Civil War – John Keegan
8. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – Rebecca Skloot read
9. A History of Christianity – Diarmaid MacCulloch
10. The Last Dragonslayer – Jasper Fforde read
11. Homicide, A Year on the Killing Streets – David Simon (I have started it, but it’s a very big book and hard to carry on my morning commute!)
12. Linger – Maggie Stiefvater read
13. True Grit – Charles Portis read
14. The Return of the Prodigal Son – Henri J. M. Nouwen
15. South Riding – Winfred Holtby read
16. Skulduggery Pleasant: The Faceless Ones – Derek Landy
17. Skulduggery Pleasant: Dark Days – Derek Landy
18. Skulduggery Pleasant: Mortal Coil – Derek Landy
(all to be read with godchild no.3 – who loves them also because I like children’s and YA fiction and the godkids are a great excuse!)
19. Safeguard of the Sea – N. A. M. Rodger
20. Battle Cry of Freedom – James McPherson
21. A Brief History of Medieval Warfare – Peter Reid
22. Ellis Island – Kate Kerrigan
23. American Wife – Curtis Sittenfeld
24. Shirley – Charlotte Bronte
25. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (yeah I have friends who read this as summer projects when they were 13, I was reading trash, what can you do?)
26. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
27. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
28. The Red and the Black – Stendahl
29. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon
30. The Macmillan Diaries: Cabinet Years 1950 – 1957 – Peter Catterall
31. Last Train from Liguria – Christine Dwyer Hickey
32. Macmillan: The Official Biography, Part One – Alistair Horne
33. Macmillan: The Official Biography, Part Two – Alistair Horne
34. The Knife of Never Letting Go – Patrick Ness
35. Aristocrats – Stella Tillyard read
36. The Queen of Attolia – Megan Whalen Turner read
37. The King of Attolia – Megan Whalen Turner read
38. Rifleman Costello – Edward Costello
39. The Demon’s Lexicon – Sarah Rees Brennan read

So nearly 40 books. That probably tell you an awful lot about me and my reading habits. There will be other things I read in 2011. At some point, I’ll re-read a Georgette Heyer or two, there’s a biography of Wellington I’m waiting to come out in paperback, two Cassandra Claire books and a Melissa Marr (more YA).

So I’m going to spend the rest of the night reading…